“The great thing, Miss Carfax, is to be impersonal. Always the work, and nothing but the work. That is how my protegées have always succeeded.”
Eve concluded that Hugh Massinger was rather young.
Miss Champion had stated that he was eccentric, but it was not the kind of eccentricity that Eve had expected to find in Purbeck Street. A youngish manservant with a bleached and dissolute face showed her into a long room that was hung from floor to ceiling with black velvet. The carpet was a pure white pile, and with the ceiling made the room look like a black box fitted with a white bottom and lid. There was only one window, and no furniture beyond a lounge covered with blood-red velvet, two bronze bowls on hammered iron pedestals, an antique oak table, two joint-stools, and a very finely carved oak court-cupboard in one corner. The fire burnt in an iron brazier standing in an open fireplace. There were no mirrors in the room, and on each square of the black velvet hangings a sunflower was embroidered in gold silk. Heraldic glass had been inserted into the centre panels of the window, and in the recess a little silver tripod lamp burnt with a bluish flame, and gave out a faint perfume.
Eve had walked from Kate Duveen’s. It was the usual wet day, and the streets were muddy, and as she sat on the joint-stool the valet had offered her she saw that she had left footprints on the white pile carpet. It seemed rather an unpropitious beginning, bringing London mud into this eccentric gentleman’s immaculate room.
She was still looking at the footprints, when the black hangings were pushed aside, and a long, thin, yellow-faced young man appeared. He was wrapped in a black velvet dressing-gown, and wore sandals.
“Miss Carfax, I presume?”
Eve had risen.
“Yes.”
“Please sit down. I’m afraid I am rather late this morning.”
Any suggestion of subtle and decadent wickedness that the room possessed was diluted by Hugh Massinger’s appearance. There was a droopingness about him, and his face was one of those long yellow faces that fall away in flaccid curves from the forehead to the chin. His nose drooped at the tip, his eyes were melancholy under drooping lids; his chin receded, and lost itself rather fatuously in a length of thin neck. His hair was of the same tint as his smooth, sand-coloured face, where a brownish moustache rolled over a wet mouth. He stooped badly, and his shoulders were narrow.